Professor Mattick’s achievements include delineation of the molecular architecture of the multifunctional enzyme that synthesizes fatty acids, the molecular genetics of surface structures used by bacterial pathogens to colonise epithelial surfaces, and the demonstration that most of the human genome is not junk but specifies an RNA-based regulatory system, which has fundamentally changed our understanding of the genetic programming of complex organisms. He founded the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland and the Australian Genome Research Facility, and is currently Director of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, acquiring technology to sequence human genomes at practical cost.